Sunday Pond

I spent two nights a couple weeks apart at Sunday Pond in Millinocket, Maine recently shooting panoramas and timelapses of Mt. Katahdin reflecting in the pond. What a beautiful place! There were intermittent thunderstorms and rain throughout most of the afternoon and evening on the first trip, which wrecked some of the timelapse I shot but what I did get was pretty incredible! The second trip was a very still night and the northern lights appeared over Mt. Katahdin for a few minutes around 1AM. I also shot some star trails on the second trip and a very long timelapse of the sunrise over the pond. Here is a video I put together of most of the iPhone video, panoramas, long night exposures, and timelapses I took. It looks best in full screen and you might have to pause it and let it buffer for a while on slower internet connections because it is a very large 1080p HD video.

I shot two spherical panoramas on the first trip that can be seen in the video. The first one was at sunset and shows the rain and stormclouds over Mt. Katahdin. It is 156 megapixels and stitched from 196 images. The second spherical panorama was taken the next morning at sunrise through the evergreen trees. It is the largest spherical panorama I’ve done yet at 1.5 gigapixels stitched from 945 photos. It was easy to align and stitch, but difficult to blend due to the rapidly changing light, and it took me a few weeks to get it finished. I put a lot more details on each panorama in the virtual tour about how they were shot, camera settings, software used in post processing, etc. Click the “i” on the menu for more information. If you hover over any of the menu items with your mouse it will tell you what they do. There is also a photo gallery icon to the lower left with the same photos shown below in this blog post, and a video button that will show the same video above in this blog post. It will also work on an iPad and most mobile devices, but not at high resolution at the moment, and the panorama thumbnails on the top left don’t currently work on an iPad for some reason. Click the preview photo below to see explore the virtual tour. It might take a minute or two to load.

I also shot a high resolution photo of the mountain with a telephoto lens. This panorama is stitched from 160 photos (10 columns x 4 rows x 4 bracketed exposures) at 200mm for a 310 megapixel image. The full image size is 7.9 x 4.8 feet. You can pan in and zoom around in the image below. Click the lower left button in the menu to see it full screen and make it easier to scroll with a mouse wheel. Mobile users can visit the website here: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/136600